1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to transaction processing systems, and more particularly to adapting a transaction-based application to process transactions over a network such as an internet or intranet.
2. Description of the Related Art
In an era of e-business, brick and mortar companies transitioning to the e-business world must retrofit/adapt existing mainframe applications to support customer to business transactions (C2B) as well as business to business transactions (B2B) on the web. These companies have their key applications and data on mainframes as a result of both heritage and the reliability/performance afforded by these systems. To utilize their current mainframe applications and data stores, IT shops need programming techniques to pass transactions from web application servers to back end applications residing on the mainframe. Many of these applications use transaction processing subsystems such as the IBM® Customer Information Control System (CICS®) or the IBM® Information Management System (IMS) in conjunction with programming languages such as COBOL or PLI. (IBM® and CICS® are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both.) In these systems, the transaction processor runtimes initiate/start programs written in languages, such as COBOL, via pragmatically callable transaction identifiers (ID). The transaction identifiers have associated with them both the program to be called and a definition of the data to be passed to and from the program. The definition and declaration of the data to be passed to and from programs is called the communication area or COMM Area. It is typically contained in COBOL programs and COBOL COPYBOOKs. Through this method of linking together programs and passing shared data, elaborate applications have been built. Unfortunately, these transaction applications have evolved over many years and have been frequently modified. The applications have become large and unwieldy. Many of the original creators have long since retired and have taken knowledge about how these applications work and where to find key parts. Finding these transactions and COMM Area definitions is required to link web technology to mainframe applications.
To further compound the problem, different programming styles and techniques were used in developing these programs. Some programs were written with the transactions neatly separated from the presentation logic (this is called External Call Interface; used in Client/Server CICS product literature or ECI), while others used techniques combining both the 3270 presentation display code with the transaction logic (this called External Presentation Interface; used in Client/Server CICS product literature or EPI). The former ECI method is easily adaptable to connectors and adapters while the latter EPI method is more troublesome since transactions are bound up in the display logic.
In summary, the problems faced by conventional methods in bringing mainframe applications out to the web are:
finding usable ECI transactions where the business logic has been already separated from the 3270 presentation logic;
extracting the key parameter definitions for communicating information to and from these transactions;
identifying which of these parameters are input, output, input/output, and unreferenced; transferring this information to a workstation from a mainframe to build connectors; and
pairing connection information with the parameter information.
Conventional methods have failed to provide solutions to these problems. Thus, there is a clearly felt need for a method of, system for, article of manufacture for, and computer program product for providing an improved adaptation of a transaction-based application to process transactions over a network such as an internet or intranet.